LIVING THE GEEK LIFE IN CAPE TOWN

Firstly, apologies for not keeping up with my usual Monday/Friday release schedule. Last week was crazy to say the least! I had a meeting with a local wildlife documentary creator who went to school with my brother, I put together a job application for a local creative researcher position, and I finished a seven page script for the Jameson First Shot scriptwriting competition.

So my brother bumped into his former classmate at a recent wedding, and his friend suggested that him and I meet. I have very few connections to the local film industry, and seeing how I am back to writing screenplays, I figured I should go have a chat. We both had super-tight schedules but we managed to meet up on Thursday afternoon. He gave me some useful info about the Johannesburg film-making scene, and some general guidance in terms of what I should be doing (network, network, network), so it turned out to be a very informative meeting.

The researcher position is for a local film collective, and while I don’t have all the skills required, they’ve sent me a practice treatment to try my hand at. From what I’ve seen it looks doable, so I should be able to bash it out in a couple of days. I am going to have to teach myself the basics of InDesign, but I’m pretty familiar with most of the Adobe packages so I should be able to pick it up pretty quickly.

The Jameson script was pretty much a last minute decision. I’m part of a scriptwriting group on Facebook and someone posted up that the deadline was coming up. I was busy working on a radio play that’s due for the end of Feb (I may put it on hold because Nickelodeon are accepting spec scripts until the end of Feb as well), but I figured I could temporarily put that aside and give the Jameson competition a bash. I have written an eight page script in six hours before, so seven pages in five days seemed like more than enough time. I did a very rough breakdown on paper, then started writing the actual script on Thursday night. I got stuck about half way through, but managed to come up with a solution early on Saturday morning. I had other things to attend to, so I came home later on Saturday hoping to finish it up, but as always life intervened and I only got back to it late Saturday night. I got up early on Sunday, wrapped it up by lunch and got it in with about five hours to spare.

So yes, needless to say I neglected the blog a bit as a result, but hopefully I’ll be able to get things back on track this week.